Understand the Context
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Product Design
Design Strategy
Product Designer
San Francisco, CA
2022.04 -Current
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"The transportation system right now is a total mess for the seniors, I would want to own a car but it is hard and expensive to get one."
"It is hard to get around the city without a vehicle, but there is no need to really own one. The only purpose is just commuting for my work and I will have to leave it in the parking lot for the rest of the day."
"Parking is so much hard to find, especially for popular destinations. While there is the need for returning the rental car back to the charging station, I'd rather pick the car-share service"
The design should allow users to use the vehicle anytime and anywhere they need
The design should allow the users to set up their own schedule
The Design should combine the services in order to expand the opportunities
The design should be easy to get on boarding
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Getting a licensed vehicle in China can be difficult, but by combining ride share with car share, we can increase the number of DiDi ride share drivers.
The Juicy autonomous robot is a charging robot that enables the user to park "almost everywhere". It will locate in each DiDi lot so that vehicle itself does not have to move around. It could be installed in community parking lots without too much infrastructure support.
The Juicy autonomous robot is a charging robot that enables the user to park "almost everywhere". It will locate in each DiDi lot so that vehicle itself does not have to move around. It could be installed in community parking lots without too much infrastructure support.
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In order to get the most use of both the vehicle and the driver’s time, The system offers a new vehicle design, Orangie, with LED light indication around the vehicle and face recognition locks to help the riders or the drives to quickly get on board.
The Juicy autonomous robot is a charging robot that enables the user to park "almost everywhere". It will locate in each DiDi lot so that vehicle itself does not have to move around. It could be installed in community parking lots without too much infrastructure support.
The vehicle Orangie uses a toggle switch to control the service mode:
The vehicle Orangie uses a toggle switch to control the service mode:
In each mode, the interior setting of the Orange Car is carefully considered, including the seat position, ambiance lights, in-car user interface.
In Carshare Mode, the center of the will stay in the middle or to the left (the driver's side) as the driver will join the conversation and probably will be the person who controls the interior atmosphere.
In the Rideshare Mode, the center will shift to the right or the back side (the riders' side) as the riders now formed a new group.
To offer the customer the best riding experience, adjust to the rideshare culture in China that all the customers enter the vehicle from the right side door, the back seat also alters its shape to make the entering easier and at the same time allow a more centripetal feeling for the conversation
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interior screens and the new DiDi app portal that supports the different passenger’s requirements while switching between carsharing and rideshare modes.
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To build an understanding of the car rental industry in China, we conducted researches in various fields, such as users, locations, infrastructures, and policies. The goal was to find out the answers to our pre-set questions like "who will be driving the rental car?" "What kind of route will they chose" Do they have any threshold while using the car renting services"
The research helped us to actually put our foot in their shoes to experience all the possible challenges that could happened to them
Field Research was also made on existing car renting services. By documenting the rental process steps by step, we were able to discover essential insights. Parking, charging sanitizing, learning the new operation, and even getting used to the new seat structure are all time-consuming and not convenient to the customers.
Another ergonomic research was conduct for the senior customers, we tried to make scenarios to actually explore the different driving experiences of senior customers.
The Concept Development phase started with ideating possible service structures. After the three key directions, "senior-friendly" "park-almost-anywhere" " combine services", were picked, we started to build all the possible concepts that might serve the goal.
The final decision was made to design an entire system that includes a vehicle design, corresponding user interfaces, a supporting charging system, and also the business strategy.
While developing the concepts, rapid prototypes are made to exam our concepts. Test mockups are made to test the measurements for the vehicle interior. Battery research is conducted with industry professionals to confirm the size and the location of the charging system.
Digital prototypes are also built to test out the workflow of the interior interface.
After the design decisions were made, we started to refine our final design. Softwares like Sketch, Figma were used to make the user interface interactable.
We also used gravity sketch to build a 1:1 size model in VR for the vehicle design to once again prove our ergonomic decisions.
